


Wisemen

by volpeanon



Category: Prototype (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Gen, and the Wisemen have had it especially bad, heap misery upon misery and utterly traumatise my boy you say???, hints at a drink problem, i wouldn't say it's super of either but it's definitely there so mind yaself, i'm being careful with the violence/gore tags, life in Blackwatch is fucked up, why don't mind if I do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:34:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22233370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volpeanon/pseuds/volpeanon
Summary: An itemised list of the things that Cross has lost, and the lessons he learnt too late.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	Wisemen

Cross doesn't remember the names of the first few. They were just faces that came and went with barely a whisper. With some of them, the only reason he noticed was because they stopped showing up at meals, or their room was suddenly barred by people in hazmat suits. But one of them had a fit in the mess hall, spitting blood and foam as his bones were crushed by his own mutating muscles. The guards didn't put him down right away. Cross will always remember the quiet argument between the guard and the doctor, their words lost under the howls of the contorting figure on the floor. Cross's performance dropped like a stone after that; he couldn't sleep, he broke into a cold sweat at the slightest twinge of pain anywhere on his body. They sedated him, in the end. That was their answer to everything. Pump it with drugs until it does what we want. He was thankful, at the time.

He remembers Paver though. Paver was the last to die before the team was declared safe for deployment. He seemed to be the best of them - even Cross just about vomited his guts out at one point, but Paver? Barely even a hiccup. They were  _ days _ out from being released from that white, disinfectant-smelling hell they had been trapped in for months as they were turned into Blackwatch's newest advancement. Paver collapsed on the treadmills and, in front of everyone's eyes, slowly turned to liquid on the floor.

Their deployment was pushed back after that, but no one else died. They came out like dogs kept in cages; eager for anything that could distract them from the crawling dread, the thoughts of  _ Jesus Christ, what have I gotten into?  _ They should have known - it was only going to get worse.

Church was the first to die on the field. Infected ripped his legs to pieces and Cross got chewed out by Randall for splitting the team, sending a handful back to try and get Church out. He died halfway and they just barely completed the objective. Cross learned a lesson that day.

Mendel and Tracy were next. A minor outbreak in a laboratory turned out to have a hive hollowed out of the earth under it, and when the floor collapsed, Tracy was the luckiest of all the Wisemen when he broke his neck under a slab of concrete. Mendel screamed for far longer than Cross would have thought someone missing so much of their body could.

Ford. Reid. Matyszak. North. Paquin. It was the training exercises that were the worst. There had to be better ways of practising than putting soldiers' lives at so much risk, didn't each Wiseman cost a small fortune to make? How the hell did Randall justify throwing them away like so much fodder? The things that Cross was pretty sure used to be gorillas, those were the worst; one cracked his spine and it was a miracle he didn't lose his legs - but he did lose Dumas, who gave Cross enough time to drag himself away, but got ripped in half neck to groin for his troubles.

Cross only found out later that a dead Wiseman could be as useful to Blackwatch's scientists as a living one.

Operation Stillwater - Operation Hailstorm - Operation Overkill - Sorola, who always used to make shitty jokes about "what is it this time, Operation Cumshot?" and was crushed slowly, bones snapping one at a time, by an infected the size of a horse. Vasami, who liked to make slow days better by doing any of the dumb shit dares his teammates could throw at him, and was blasted to pieces because he couldn't tear free of the infected and Cross had no choice but to blow the tank  _ now _ .

Every one. Cross can remember every single one of them, because they were the first. They were proud to be the front line of Blackwatch's finest together, drawing eyes and hushed admiration wherever they went. They explored their new strengths together, tested their limits together. He was captain, yes, they were his men and he bore the responsibility of all of them, but he was barely thirty and he just wanted to live and breathe and  _ be _ Blackwatch. The red line was drawn. Cross wouldn't let it go if God descended from the heavens and told him to.

Then, suddenly, he was the last Wiseman left.

He stood over that runner, her limbs streaked with dust and blood and the orange stain of disease, her chest looking like a lawn mower had chewed it up. Every bullet he had left, he'd pumped into her to make sure she didn't get back up again. This was for them, for the last of the Wisemen, that she had torn apart with her own hands or with the infected she left in her wake. This was for Juarez, the last man but Cross, who he'd carried for two days despite the protests - _captain, you have to leave me, get the runner, leave me_ \- before he had to collapse and sleep. He woke up to the gunshot and a note scratched in the dirt. _Hold the red line, captain._ It was for them that Cross put his boot on that runner's throat even as she sobbed 'please, I didn't want this, they did this to me' and caved in her chest cavity with a deafening hail of bullets. When he was finally picked up and taken back home, to what passed as home when it was empty of everyone who had ever made it feel like a home, it was all he could do to get his hands on a bottle of something strong and knock himself out with it while he waited for orders. He remembers the meeting with Randall, who met Cross's bloodshot eyes without a single word for all the men who’d given their lives. “You've more than proven yourself an asset, captain,” was all he said. “You'll have a new team.”

He didn’t want a new team. He didn’t want to be a captain that threw his soldiers away like empty magazines. But they came, still clumsy with their new enhancements and wide-eyed with the stories they’d heard about him. And they weren’t like him, like the first Wisemen; they were cheaper and safer to make, more ‘stable’, whatever the hell that meant, but when it came to the push they couldn’t keep up with him - and he was furious, because how the hell was he supposed to keep them alive if they weren’t even as good as the last lot? He couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear sitting with them for meals like he should have done, or laughing with them in the backs of transport. They’d be dead soon.

Then there was Shkurti. Furious and destructive and desperate to prove herself in a place that couldn’t have been more unfriendly to her if it’d tried. She didn’t give a shit. She tried to keep up with him and when she couldn’t she’d give him a look that said ‘next time’. She did get closer, closer than anyone else ever did. She was the kind of woman that would’ve changed the world if she had been pushed anywhere but Blackwatch, anywhere but the Wisemen. She drew the red line in her own blood, and even Randall had to say something that hinted at a begrudging respect in the aftermath. Cross could have slammed the man’s head off his own desk. It wasn’t enough, it would never be enough. But he just went back to his room, got the bottle that was becoming so familiar, and the next thing he knew they were all in there, every last one of the Wisemen - his Wisemen - climbing on the furniture and sitting in each others’ laps to fit, packing that tiny room to the gunnels, taking the bottle gently out of his hands and passing it round and saying ‘it wasn’t your fault, captain’.

He had to pretend he was just exhausted, and hide his face in his arm, and if any of them noticed the tears, they didn’t say anything. He didn’t replace the bottle. He became a presence in places that weren’t practice or the drill field. He got to know the people behind the names and he pressed down the creeping dread that came with enjoying Corerdo’s shitty knock knock jokes or Alvear’s inventive insults. He sat with them when they came back to base quiet, painfully aware of the empty seats. He found, with time, that it was easier to be with them when it hurt than it was to be alone.

And then they came to Manhattan, and Randall gave him half, a third, a fragment of the information on the runner - but Cross was the one that said “I’m your man, sir.” And Cross is the one left on the rooftop screaming  _ fall back, fall the fuck back!  _ as Alex Mercer, already stained with the blood of twenty Wisemen, grabs the last of them one, by one, by one, devouring their bodies, turning them into nothing. Just like that, they're all gone, and Cross is the last of the Wisemen again.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a fluffy bastard so a MINIMUM of 90% of the Wisemen survive in the rest of the shit I make, but sometimes symmetry, y'know? I've only once eaten the guys on the street when you land after the fight with Cross, but when I did it I did wonder if they were perhaps also Wisemen and I had just destroyed the entire team whoops, and somehow this came from that.


End file.
